


These Names Are Scars We Have Fought For

by flightofthedragons



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Genre: Gen, Learning to care, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 15:31:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2155758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightofthedragons/pseuds/flightofthedragons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These five were not blood, they were not even of the same race, but they were family.</p>
<p>Before that, however, they were their own people, and they were alone. This is how the Guardians became who they were before they came together. This is about the scars they carried with them in the identities they forged.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Peter Quill

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for the endings on some of these, my email shut down so I didn't get a chance to get feedback on them. Each chapter is completely separate from each other, but it didn't seem worth posting them individually.

Peter Quill, who calls himself Starlord. Peter, the lost boy, who never aged, who flew in a fairy tale land and battled with pirates and saved damsels and never grew old. Depending which tale you believe, he was also a murderer, who discarded anyone who dared to grow older than he deemed suitable.

Peter also means 'rock' in Greek. In Terran. It was his mother who named him and who christened him 'Starlord.' It was she who brought him into life, a small boy liable to grow old and soft who was still learning what it meant to be a rock when he was pulled from his foundation into a life far from home. And so he molded himself with relics of the past-- old names and songs and stories from times before him to bear like a torch before all who would see him change. He forged an identity that he would risk his life to keep all the pieces of. Yondu accused Peter Quill of being soft, soft enough to eat, to bite, or to kill, but the child he'd picked up had grown rock hard and become the the Peter who had the stomach to cast off his own Lost Boys when the time came for it.

Those times came depressingly often.

It was Meredith Quill who gave Starlord his name, all of it, his identity and the pieces of it that he refused to let go of. Even his surname broke Terran custom by belonging to Meredith rather than the man who fathered him. It was she who passed onto him a name of feathers, or rather a feather, stolen from a bird and no longer intended to fly. Instead, quills are made to create, to be dipped in liquid and trailed across a surface to to form so many lines and loops. To create something new.

And perhaps Peter Quill never felt like much of a creator. Perhaps he was more of a forger, given less than the required tools and a basic goal to focus on. Perhaps he was so used to flying that he could not imagine losing his feathers to create something new.

Or perhaps that is precisely why he wanted to. Perhaps the Lord of Stars had learned that, flying, you can only go so far before the stars die and you remember that you are utterly alone. Perhaps that is why he took the name Starlord, to create a new persona that was not still anchored to his Terran roots.

Or perhaps that is why, when they came attacking and wanted only money and vengeance, he made them his friends. Perhaps the forger took what he was given and created a family from the team that nearly killed him.

Terrans had long since associated the stars with dreams providing light and warmth but being utterly unreachable. To Starlord, they were not so unreachable. Perhaps they were not so uncontrollable, either.


	2. Rocket Raccoon

Twenty-three prisons. Rocket has been to 23 prisons, and each and every time, they get his name wrong. Oh, they learn his name, eventually, but still the guards refuse to use it. They call him instead by the string of numbers and letters assigned to him in his nightmares, dredging up the past and tying him to the ground.

Rocket does not know what a raccoon is, he knows only that there is no one like him and that he is completely and utterly alone (until he isn't). He does know what 'vermin' means, if not by its definition than the tones that accompany it. That is not what he is.

Subject 89P13 is not a name. It is not a title, it is not an honorific, it is not an alias. It is a serial code, a measure of the experiments done before he'd gotten there. Rocket is not an experiment. He is an explosion, ready to attack-- to lash out at his enemies and anyone he does not trust, which turns out to be nearly everyone. More importantly, he is ready to escape the gravity holding him prisoner against any planet, to launch himself wherever needs going. He is artificially made by another's hands and mind, but he is not controlled by them.

Rocket chose his name, and he did so intentionally. He is not an experiment, and he is not vermin. He is a weapon, whether he wants to be or not. Rocket did not ask to be made, but he is learning to remake himself.


	3. Groot

He is Groot.

Groot is a name, but it is also so much more than a name. Groot is a word, an identity, a concept. They think Groot is one third of his vocabulary, but it's not, really. He knows more than 3 words, Groot is just most of them. 

"I am Groot."

Even when he learns to change most of his sentence, the 'Groot' part stays the same. It's a constant in his life, a word with many meanings that he can convey when he needs to while restating his identity. It's more than himself, a name that encompasses other people. Who knows where the word came from? It belongs to him, and it is evolving into more.

We are Groot. 

If he is Groot, then so are his friends.


	4. Drax the Destroyer

Drax the Destroyer is a literal person, and if he says he destroys, he means it. he was built for destruction, it feels like. Nevermind the fact that he never broke anything before Ronan came.

He directs his violence, his crimes, against those who had obliterated his family, yet his name is not the Vengeful. Drax would bring death upon a thousand innocent people to end his foes. He would create a thousand more Destroyers, angry for the losses of their own daughters and wives, brothers and sons, if it meant revenge.

They do not call him Destroyer for those who deserve to die by his hands; they refer instead to those he does not see-- the people he uses and takes from in his sense of righteousness, in his brokenness. Drax is too far gone in his grief to see the fault in his actions.

Drax the Destroyer is an honest man, and he does not hide the deaths that trail behind him.


	5. Gamora

Gamora is the adopted daughter of death. Death came to her people and they died. Death came to her, and she killed.

"The deadliest woman in the Galaxy" they called her, as if she was proud of her skills as a murderess. As if the biggest difference between her and the murderers like Thanos was gender. Thanos called her his favorite daughter, and Nebula and Gamora both resented him for it. They were not his daughters, and they were not his weapons. They were each others' sisters, at least for a while.

But it was not Nebula who was the deadliest. It was not Nebula who stayed alive in prison because others feared her, and then again because Peter Quill did not.

Gamora lived, surrounded by enemies and shrouded in death. She prepared to die amongst these friends who had given her life.

Instead, she was reborn.


End file.
